Recent scholarship on Iran by Golbarg Rekabtalaei and others emphasizes how Tehran from the 1940s to the 1970s became a “diasporic hub of highly diverse national, ethnic, religious and linguistic communities” that facilitated frequent social and cultural exchanges and encounters. Several processes that greatly contributed to what has been described as Tehran’s cosmopolitan milieu were the accelerated spread of American-style consumer capitalism post-WWII, the growth of Western-inspired advertising and magazine formats alongside an increasingly literate public, and a widespread zeal for modernization shared by the state and many in the middle and upper classes. While the cosmopolitan dimension of Tehrani culture has been extensively described in the realms of cinema and music especially, less attention has been dedicated to food culture. While many scholars have rightly highlighted the importance of new kitchen gadgets as part of the modernizing wave, food culture’s interaction with modernization discourses meant far more than time-saving appliances. This essay argues that cooking among the middle and upper classes furthered the diffusion of a cosmopolitan consumerism. Cooking sections in magazines, along with general food advertising, encouraged women, largely housewives and daughters, to view themselves as part of what Lauren Berlant calls an intimate public, “an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience” – in this case, cooking. My research builds on the efforts of scholars in several subfields, such as Rekabtalaei’s exploration of Tehran’s cinematic cosmopolitanism and Houchang Chehabi’s work on culinary history. Unlike many previous studies, which focus heavily on the diaspora and act as cookbooks, I concentrate on the largely middle class, female readership of Zan-e Ruz, Iran’s most widely circulated women’s magazine of the 1960s and 1970s. I use the magazine’s regular “Cooking” section (later renamed “Cooking and Housekeeping”), along with memoirs and advertising from Zan-e Ruz and other publications, to demonstrate how Zan-e Ruz’s writers and editors encouraged an intimate public of consumers centered around the shared consumption of Iranian and cosmopolitan food and modern food and health trends. Eating and cooking served the common purposes of sustaining the body and fostering sociability, but they also allowed Iranians, particularly women, to build social capital by marking themselves as modern, health-conscious, and fashionable.